That’s the first reaction you might have if you are trying to figure out your WordPress conversion tasks, right?

Even if you are just a beginner and not really a web expert, you can definitely create a WordPress theme for as long as you know how WordPress works.

If you’ve been using WordPress as your website platform, chances are, you’re tired of using generic WordPress themes for your site. You might even think of just doing your own theme to have your preferred styles and features.

Customizing Your WordPress site

You can design your ideal site by creating a mockup in Photoshop and then convert the PSD file to HTML and CSS. Afterwards, you can then convert it to a fully functional WordPress theme.

Designing websites using Photoshop PSD files and then converting it to WordPress themes is one of the easiest shortcuts in web design and development today. It is the most ideal way to provide your client a site with small amount of time and with ease.

It is easy-peasy, believe it!

This tutorial will help you learn how to convert your HTML and CSS static site to a fully functional WordPress blog theme.

Converting HTML and CSS static site to WordPress theme will be your shortcut in web design and development. This means you can easily deliver your customer’s site at ease within a small amount of time.

Reading this tutorial, you can simply gain knowledge on how to create your own WordPress theme.

Disclaimer: You need to have a background knowledge about HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP.

Here Are Your Expected Results

At the end of this tutorial, you will learn how to convert your plain HTML and static site to a fully functional WordPress blog theme. This tutorial will give you insight about WordPress blog theme templates which we have stated in the first part of the tutorial.

This tutorial will encourage you to apply the following coding standards to your WordPress theme:

Validate your HTML and CSS codes first. You can use service like W3C’s validation site to ensure that your markup and styles are valid.

Ensure that your WordPress code syntax won’t cause any issues. You can always visit this site to check your codes if it aligns to the WordPress Coding Standards.

Always test your code on all browsers if possible. Check if your site works across all major browsers to avoid any further issues on your theme.

Test your code on multiple devices. As mobile and tablets users grow it is ideal if you would check if your site is responsive and is working across modern devices.

What You Have Learned So Far

If you’ve been following this tutorial, the WordPress theme was named via style.css and a screenshot was added for the theme to be identifiable at the WordPress admin panel.

After doing this, the theme was activated. Really, there are more things to do. Familiarize with the steps covered in the first part of this series to enjoy this second serving for you will be learning things a notch higher.

More focus would be on the rest of the WordPress templates that have defined on the first part of this tutorial.

OK, without further do, let’s finish the remaining templates so that a fully functional WordPress theme can be achieved.

Resources You Need

What’s the Fuss about This Tutorial

In the first part of this series, you were how to prepare your HTML and CSS files for WordPress and then brand and activate the theme.

In this last part of the series, you will learn what codes each remaining WordPress template must have to build a working WordPress theme.

At the end of this tutorial, you will have the same output just like the demo image file we posted in part 1 of the series.

STEP 1 – Defining constants and registering navigation menu support

The theme is already active! Now add support to the theme directory as well as the navigation menu thru the functions.php. Go ahead and create the functions.php file first on the root directory of the NeoBlog WP theme.

Next, define the constants for the theme directory. Go ahead and copy the code below to the functions.php recently created.

(Note: Since this is a php file all of the functions and codes relating to php must be enclosed with < ?php ?> tag.)

An add_action hook has been added to register the navigation menu. The first argument is the tag (to which the action will be added later) and the second argument specifies the register_my_menus function to call.

STEP 2 – Creating header.php

Now, create the header.php file. Open index.html and copy everything from the opening DOCTYPE declaration to the ending tag and then paste it into the header.php file created on the NeoBlog WP theme folder.

Some of static HTML tags can be replaced by the WordPress built-in functions such as the language, meta information, body class and so on.

Add the wp_head hook before the closing head tag. Use this hook by having the function echo the output to the browser, or by having it perform background tasks. For more information about this, see the WordPress Codex.

For the navigation menu, use the wp_nav_menu function to display a navigation menu created in the admin panel of WordPress.

The theme_location parameter will display the menu assignment to the location it was set. Otherwise, if it was not set, the parameter fallback_cb will determine what is displayed.

STEP 3 – Creating footer.php

For this part, create the blank footer.php and once again open index.html from the NeoBlog HTML and CSS theme folder. Copy everything from the sharing idea section to footer section. Then paste it to the footer.php file on the NeoBlog WP theme folder.

The codes above contain function that calls main-sidebar widget callbacks and prints the markup for the sidebar but, first, it will test if the sidebar is active before proceeding.

STEP 6 – Populating the Index File

After adding all of these template files, work on the Home Page – the index.php file. Go ahead and create first the index.php on the root directory of the NeoBlog WP theme.
Now, put some codes on thew index.php file to display the changes.

<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Now, let’s now check out the front page of the NeoBlog WP theme and see results.

Notice that the header and the footer are on their proper positions except for the sidebar.

To add the contents inside the home page, open the index.html file and copy the blog area section up to the closing div tag of box-layer align-center page-nav class and then paste it just under the get_header function. You’ll get similar codes below.

The codes above will only show a static display of the theme. To make this dynamic, structure the WordPress loop within the markup of the blog area. Copy the code below and replace the blog area just copied from index.html file.

The WordPress loop are PHP blocks of code used by WordPress to display posts. Using the loop, WordPress processes each post to be displayed on the current page, and formats it according to how it matches specified criteria within the loop tags. The WP loop usually comes with these blocks of PHP codes:

Next, you will tinker the page navigation that was already added on the index.php file. The following code will call the wp_query, a class defined in the WordPress core that deals with the intricacies of a posts (or pages) request to a WordPress blog.

It will then set the previous_post_link and next_posts_link function to add a navigation to the blog post list.

Again, there is nothing new to this file except that it doesn’t have the comment section since this is a regular page.

In the next 2 files, create 2 WordPress built-in Post Types template. These are pages that display page layout differently.

STEP 9 – Working with page-about.php

For this part of the tutorial, first create a php file and call it page-about.php. Since this page is focused on the details about the website owner, it just contains plain HTML codes along with the header, sidebar and footer.

Add a comment at the beginning of the page-about.php file to make sure WordPress will treat the file as a page template.

STEP 10 – Working with page-contact.php

Many WordPress plugins can add a contact form to the blog, but a plugin is sometimes unnecessary. For the page-contact.php file, add a little bit of PHP and JavaScript codes. First, go ahead and create the page-contact.php file.

Now, create a simple contact form. Simply paste the following code on the page-contact.php.

What has been done here is simply to make sure that the form has been submitted and filed correctly. If an error, such as an empty field or incorrect email address occurrs, a message is returned and the form isn’t submitted.

Next, create the form and display the error messages below each text box and text area field.

These codes will simply check if the comments are enabled on the WordPress admin panel using an if statement. If it returns true, it will get the number of comments and simply display all comments returned.

Take note these codes alone won’t yet display comments, one needs to create the comment_template, using the comments.php file. For this part of the tutorial, go ahead and create this file on the NeoBlog WP theme directory.

There are a lot of things happening on this file. First, it will test if the post needs a password for the user to be able to comment. Next, if it returns true, the comments number and comments will be displayed.

Notice that there is also a navigation to see the comments (both previous and next) using the previous_comments_link and next_comments_link function.

Finally, use wp_list_comments to display all comments for a post or page based on a variety of parameters, including the ones set in the administration area.

Next, add some wp_enqueue_script to check if the threaded comment is enabled. If it returns true, it will enable comment reply. Open up your functions.php and copy the code below on it.

STEP 15 – Working with 404.php

Creating a custom 404 page is easy using the 404.php template in a WordPress theme. This will make sure that every link actually goes to a specific web page. If there is a broken link, it will display this page.

For this part of the tutorial, create a simple 404 page template. Copy the code below.

Our Final Project

Tips You Ought to Remember for This Part of the Tutorial

Always check out the WordPress Codex for functions, tags and PHP codes. This will keep you on the right path in dealing with codes.

Make sure to use well-structured, error-free PHP and valid HTML. See WordPress Coding Standards.

Follow design guidelines in site design and layout.

Always Backup your files. Always, always backup your files just in case you made changes on a template file so that you can easily retrieve it later.

Seek for help. If you are working on a different theme, chances are you might have some issues while converting some files. I recommend asking help in Stackoverflow community, which is a community of developers helping each other’s codes issues.

What Troubleshooting Techniques You Can Use

There is not really an official rule to check on errors while you are developing a theme. It might be your own codes or some typographical error you just missed on your WordPress templates.